Sailor Fuku refers to the characteristic "sailor suit"◊ schoolgirl uniforms worn in Japan. Sailor fuku uniforms are actually based on late Victorian/early 20th-century "rational dress" girl's fashions◊ (themselves based on European naval uniforms), but the prevalence of sailor-suited school girls in anime, manga, and other forms of Japanese media show how iconic the sailor fuku is in Japan. This is true despite many Japanese schools having switched to more Western-patterned uniforms. However, there are some American schools that use Sailor Fuku.

It may depend on the region, but in Real Life recently the sailor suit (and the traditional male counterpart, the gakuran—a black ensemble with a high collar, based on Prussian officer uniforms) has become largely the domain of middle/junior high schools, whereas high schools have shifted towards more fashionable or professional-looking styles of uniform, often with tailored blazers, vests, neckties, and plaid skirts. Elementary schools, if they have a uniform, tend towards collarless jackets and skirts with suspenders — and sometimes, students wear their gym uniforms during class and change into their formal uniforms when outside of the school or attending ceremonies.

In an inversion of a western trope, in the 70s and late 80s, the common image of a female delinquent had an extremely long skirt, but this appears less frequently these days.

Examples

open/close all folders

Anime and Manga

Though the central female characters of Sailor Moon are actually junior high-schoolers, not only do they all wear sailor uniforms in their "civilian" lives, their Senshi uniforms seem to be clearly based on them as well; indeed, this is where the "Sailor" in the name comes from. This is later justified when it is revealed that the sailor-suit concept comes from ancestral memories of the heroes' uniform, not vice-versa. The last season has the girls in highschool, and they keep wearing sailor uniforms as school clothes, only with a darker color scheme (the blue of the collar and the skirts in the HS uniforms is almost navy blue).

Kagome Higurashi in InuYasha wears her school uniform while hunting monsters in the sengoku period, centuries before they were invented. She's a time traveller from the present day and Word of God says—tongue planted firmly in cheek—that she prefers it because it's durable. Almost at the end of the series, however, Kagome is shown as a highschool student and she's wearing a blazer uniform instead of her iconic seifuku.

In Ranma ˝, Kodachi's all-girls school uses a white and light brown seifuku.

In Tasogare no Udewa Densetsu, one of the fetished-up outfits that Shugo discovers in a treasure chest is a sailor fuku.

The character designer for the .hack//Another Birth novels has mentioned considering giving Akira a sailor fuku in the real world, but decided against it as they were overused, and gave her a less common blazer uniform.

Haruhi, the local wholesome female cross-dresser, infiltrates an elementary school with a 17-year old male classmate named Honey. Honey, who has a huge case of Older Than They Look, dresses in his old elementary school uniform while Haruhi puts on her dark blue middle school sailor fuku. The rest of the club admits that the two stick out anyway so the disguises are useless: they just wanted to see Haruhi in a schoolgirl's uniform.

The Ouran Academy has a more elaborate get-up for female students (at least the high school division; the middle school division actually does have sailor fuku), but that doesn't stop Renge from occasionally cosplaying her favourite Visual Novel's heroine in fuku. Also St. Lobelia has Sailor Fuku, which actually resemble long skirts.

Haruhi Suzumiya revolves around a high-school club, and thus, sailor fuku appear in abundance. In Volume 1 of the novels, Kyon wonders if the principal has a fetish for this since male students wear blazers and ties, but girls wear the more traditional sailor uniform.

Ruki from Digimon Tamers uses a blazer-like uniform instead (in fact, she's the only of the primary school-aged kids whose school uses an uniform), though she always changes out as soon as she gets home.

Mahora Academy girls used the seifuku as uniform by the time Sayo was a student, but now they use Western uniforms. Sayo herself still wears the seifuku but that's because she's a Cute Ghost Girl who died quite a while ago.

Other 3-A students will dress like this from time to time, including the Narutaki twins (though Fuka will sometimes wear shorts in lieu of a skirt, as seen in Volume 2 of the manga).

Chiyo's two friends from elementary school wear these upon entering middle school. Chiyo's somewhat jealous that she'll never get to wear one because she skipped ahead to high school, but they note that they are not likely get into her school.

A delightful sequence occurs where Kaname Chidori, normally dressed in the school's fairly unusual outfit, agrees to become "manager" for a rugby club: and so puts on a more traditional sailor fuku (and carries a kettle).

When Commander Mardukas has just threatened Sousuke with terrible retribution should he do anything indecent to Tessa while she is staying in Japan, when the girl in question enters wearing a Jindai High School uniform. Cue open-mouthed response from both males, until Tessa asks what they're staring at.

Hitomi from The Vision of Escaflowne wears her school uniform for most of the series, even though she's been transported to another world where Japanese high schools are not present. In one episode, she's given a local dress to wear, only to rip off the skirt so that she can run freely later. Interestingly, the dress rips completely cleanly and evenly, leaving her with an outfit that looks amazingly similar to her school uniform. Also, Hitomi's uniform in itself is a mix of both styles: the collar of the Western-inspired school jacket looks a lot like the collar of a seifuku when you look at it close, and it also has a red scarf like a seifuku usually would.

In one episode of Bottle Fairy, the fairies, while imagining going to school, are all in sailor fuku... except for Cloudcuckoolander Hororo, who dresses up in the equivalent iconic uniform for kindergarten and elementary school. The others get her straightened out by the time "class" starts, though.

The manga version of Read or Die included this when parodying (but using) fanservice moments, with Yomiko donning one of the much younger Nenene's fuku. It's even lampshaded.

A variant of the standard sailor uniform as a one-piece dress somehow winds up in the thrift store in Haibane Renmei, where Rakka buys it and wears it for the majority of the series.

Love Hina, the younger tenants are occasionally seen in them, and Kitsune and Naru are prominently seen in flashbacks...and, occasionally, not in flashbacks.

The sailor fuku's worn in Maria-sama ga Miteru are an interesting variety, in that they have very long skirts and are generally not very flattering. In that, they may actually be more like the real thing. It's also notable in that they appear to be one-piece dresses, as opposed to the typical separate blouse and skirt.

The VF-1A "Angel Bird" variant Valkyrie from the first episode of Super Dimension Fortress Macross. Though it never transforms out of fighter mode on-screen, the paint scheme becomes oddly familiar in Battroid mode. One of the many such Easter Eggs thrown into the first few episodes of the series.

The sailor uniforms in Saki appear to have quite some variation in skirt lengths, ranging from way below the knees to ultra-short, permanently flashy miniskirts—the latter usually reserved for younger characters, sometimes combined with Zettai Ryouiki.

Aoi Hana: The all-girl high school attended by Akira, Fujigaya, has relatively realistically depicted sailor fukus, with skirts way below the knee.

Takane Katsu in Burst Angel wears this, wields a sword, and drives a motorcycle. And she's a police officer who snags Jo's arm with a thrown cuff on a chain.

While the tops of Hayate the Combat Butler's Hakuou Academy have resemblance to the style, the skirts are ankle length and are actually dresses. Isumi still dislikes them for being 'breezy', though she wears kimonos.

Hanaukyō Maid Tai La Verite episode 8. When Konoe doesn't have any civilian clothes to wear, her assistant Yashima Sana dresses her in one of these and then puts on one herself. They look like a cross between a normal Japanese School Uniform and a Catholic school uniform.

Cherry Juice: Haruka Fukushima, author of the shojo manga, admits in the omake that one of the main reasons she decided to make a high-school romance series was so that she would have the opportunity to draw Sailor Fuku.

Kochikame: Special Detectives Moonlight and Venus are male variants of Sailor Fuku who make their role in fighting crime using old fighter jets and made appearances in every TV special.

The high school attended by the lead character has grey gakurans for the boys and blazer uniforms for the girls, and thus fukus were not seen for most of the early manga. This makes the appearance of Lisa Yadomaru, a woman likely in her twenties, wearing the fuku a little jarring.

Following the Time Skip, Ichigo's little sisters Karin and Yuzu wear fukus on entering middle school. Orihime and Tatsuki used to wear fukus when they attended middle school, presumably the same one Karin and Yuzu go to.

In the flashback to the time when Ichigo and Chad met in middle school, both are wearing traditional black gakuran.

The Everything but the rain backstory mini-arc shows that Karakura High School used to have the seifuku as its girls' uniform around 20-25 years ago, though with shorter skirts than usual. The person shown wearing one was the younger Masaki Kurosaki aka the woman who would later become Ichigo, Yuzu and Karin's mother.

Trans girl Nitori starts wearing one in elementary to pass as a girl while out with her friends. She continues to wear it casually in middle school, despite her school not using them. She is mistaken for a New Transfer Student when she goes to her school as a girl in her sailor fuku one day. She is immediately sent off to the nurse while her parents were called.

When the True Companions split off into various high schools Sasa, Momoko, and Chizuru got put into an all-girls schools that uses Sailor Fuku. In comparison Nitori, Makoto, Doi, Oka, Seya, and Maho go to schools that have the contemporary "blazer" style uniforms, while Takatsuki and Chiba got into a school that is uniform-free (which Nitori wanted to go to but failed enrollment for; Takatsuki is a trans boy and entered the school specifically to avoid wearing a skirt). Nitori doesn't buy a new sailor fuku in high school, and instead gets a new girls uniform that matches her male uniform.

The incident that led Yuki to become a hikikomori and drop out of school involved her classmates forcing her to put on a fuku, as a part of the bullying they subjected her to for being trans sexual.

The anthropomorphized Sealand always wears a male sailor suit. Italy occasionally wears a shirt that looks a lot like the top of one.

In the notes for Gakuen Hetalia, Taiwan is seen wearing a sailor fuku instead of the more Western-oriented uniforms worn by the other girl nations.

In the pictures of the Japanese prefectures, several of the prefectures wear clothes resembling either seifuku (Akita, Fukui, Gunma, Kochi) or gakuran (Aomori, Saga, Kagoshima, Ehime, Fukushima), while others wear what looks like Western uniforms (Iwate, Miyagi, Tokushima, Hyougo, Kyoto, etc.)

Tomonaga Yoshiko in Sisterism wears one in a chapter.

A oneshot in Robot: Super Color Comic takes place in The Future where Sailor Fuku are no longer used however the protagonists of the chapter wear them while going to a picnic. They try to cosplay as 21st century girls, eating food from that period (crepes) and going down to the long-since evacuated areas below ground.

Parodied along with just about every other anime trope in Martian Successor Nadesico. Impractically short-skirted sailor fuku feature prominently in the titular space battleship's "Early 21st Century High School" virtual reality entertainment program and one character trying to seduce another hacks the program to make her skirt even shorter.

In Millennium Actress Chiyoko is often shown wearing a sailor fuku in the scenes depicting her childhood: unlike modern versions it's a genuine 1930s-era winter uniform made out of heavy wool for durability and cut with "room to grow" bagginess.

In Kill la Kill, Senketsu is a sentient sailor fuku with an Eyepatch of Power who is often worn by the main character, Ryuko (and at least once by Satsuki◊ and Mako◊). It's worth noting that in this series, clothes are weaponized to the point of being Powered Armor, and the show even gives a Call Back to the fact that sailor fuku were originally military uniforms.

In Girls und Panzer, the girls of Oarai Academy, the only shown high school that does not have a national theme, wear them as their school uniform.

Takiko Okuda aka the Genbu no Miko, who is from the Japan of The Roaring Twenties, wears hakama to her new school in the countryside. According to Word of God, however, she used to wear the (very recently implemented) fuku when she lived in Tokyo.

Suzuno Ohsugi aka the Byakko no Miko wears a dark blue fuku with a long skirt, a black scarf and black tights underneath, a spitting image of the traditional one. She is from the Japan of the late 20's/early 30's, and as said above the fuku and gakuran had been implemented as uniforms few years ago; when Suzuno appears as a teenager in both the original series and Byakko Ibun, she's in her fuku.note (Warning: there are HUGE spoilers for the first chapter of Byakko Ibun behind the link)

Miaka Yuuki and Yui Hongo, the Suzaku and Seiryuu no Miko respectively, wear Western-styled uniforms, nevermind being in junior high rather than highschool.

While Shinichi, Ran and Sonoko go to a highschool that prefers the blazer style, the junior high they used to go to had the gakuran and fuku. Akako, Aoko, Kaitou and Hakuba's own school still uses seifuku (a dark blue one) and gakuran.

Kazuha and Heiji's school in Osaka also favors the seifuku (also a dark blue one) and the gakuran, and they show up wearing them at the start of the Desperate Revival arc.

In the Detective Koshien mini arc, the highschool aged amateur sleuths are asked to wear their school uniforms. Hakuba wears normal clothes that do look a bit like a school outfit (since he's an exchange student he's not that boun to such rules), Tokitsu puts on a light blue blazer uniform, Heiji wears the aforementioned gakuran... and seeing Koshimizu in a blue seifuku with a white scarf reveals to Conan, Hakuba and Heiji that she isn't a boy. It's a plot point: Koshimizu is actually 20 years old, but uses her old seifuku to make herself look younger and blend in better.

Youko, a one-time character who tried to pass herself as Shinichi's girlfriend to rope him into helping her rescue a kidnapped boy whom she was babysitting was wearing a white and blue seifuku.

Also used in a flashback within another case. Many girls who wore seifuku with extremely long skirts (which as said above was a style associated with girl delinquents) were victims of hit-and-run incidents 20 years ago. A delinquent girl whose best friend was one of the madman's victims posed as a bait to help the police catch the culprit, deliberately wearing her skirt long despite the danger — and succeeded into getting the man caught, though she and one of the policemen investigating the case were severely injured in the process. To see how the story itself ended and who the school girl actually is, see "May–December Romance".

The "Itinerant Drama Troupe" filler case has New Transfer Student Tamanosuke Itou, who shows up at Teitan High School wearing a gakuran rather than the school's light blue blazer outfit.

In the "Darkness of the Prefectural Police" case, a middle-school girl named Tsuyako is seen wearing a fuku. She wears it in a flashback... and right when she's shot dead. Her older brother, who was standing next to her and wearing a blazer uniform, would become the case's Sympathetic Murderer.

In The Twelve Kingdoms, Youko and Yuuka's highschool uses a dark gray, long-skirted seifuku as its girls's uniform. The anime makes their originally all-girls school into a mixed gender one and Youko's childhood friend/Yuka's suitor Asano is shown using a normal blazer uniform.

In the first movie, Tenchi Muyo in Love, Ryoko and Ayeka wear a black version of the sailor fuku, blending in with the rest of Achika and Nobuyuki's class.

The Tenchi UniverseHigh School A.U. has the cast as highschoolers and averts the trope since Tenchi, Ayeka and Ryoko wear blazer uniforms.

Averted in Tenchi in Tokyo too: when Tenchi transfers to a Tokyo highschool, the uniforms are blazers for both boys and girls.

In Mohiro Kitoh's Narutaru, the prestigious all-girls school that Satomi and later Mamiko and Shiina attend has a black seifuku with a white scarf and red tights as its uniform.

In Bokurano, also by Kitoh, Mako/Nakama's junior high uses a white and gray fuku.

Subverted in Code Geass. The female uniforms of Ashford Academy are very obviously Western inspired, but a mere look at the boys's uniforms will show that they're pretty much gakuran outfits - just without the golden buttons. Considering the massive stigma against the Japanese or "Eleven" in the story, this may be a rather ironic Shout-Out.

The school attended by Tohru and several of the Sohmas uses gakuran and seifuku, though the girls's magic skirts are extremely short. Arisa Uotani, however, wears a much longer skirt — it comes from having been a former delinquent.

In the flashbacks, a younger Kyouko also wore a seifuku when she was a student, probably at the same school.

Mekakucity Actors: Ayano and Shintaro are shown wearing a fuku and gakuran, respectively, as middle-schoolers while the high-school uniform is a formal shirt and tie with checker-pattern skirt/pants. The fuku has so often been associated with Ayano in the fanbase that she even wears it inside the Daze, despite the fact that when she committed suicide, she was in her junior year of high-school, and wearing the appropriate uniform.

Sakura's elementary school follows the fuku-type uniform for boys as well as girls. The boys wear a uniform identical to the girl version, except they wear 3/4-length black trousers instead of the girls's white skirts. A flashback reveals that the middle school Touya attended followed the standard fuku for girls and gakuran for boys pattern (as he is shown wearing one). The high school switches to a shirt-tie-trousers/pleated skirt uniform.

Sakura's mother Nadeshiko and her best friend Sonomi used to wear this type of uniform when they were in high school. In fact, Nadeshikp wore it when she met Fujitaka, and apparently when she married him too!

The school attended by Kamui and the Monou siblings has gakuran for the boys and Western-looking blazers for the girls. Later, the junior high and highschool aged Dragons of the Heavens (Kamui, Yuzuriha, Sorata and Arashi) transfer to CLAMP Campus and switch to frilly Western school uniforms.

Saiki attends a different school and wears a gakuran, while Yuzuriha's old school had blazers for both genders.

Arashi Kishuu wears a light brown and white seifuku almost all the time, until she transfers to CLAMP Campus with the others.

In The Princeof Tennis, some schools favor the fuku/gakuran combination (Seishun Gakuen aka Seigaku, Rokkaku, Fudomine) while others prefer the blazer designs for both genders (Hyotei, Saint Rudolph, Rikkaidai). Yamabuki is a rather curious case since the male students wear white gakurans, but the girls wear an odd all-white blouse/skirt combo that looks like a tennis outfit. Here is a summer female uniform comparison chart taken from the 'Gakuensai no Oujisama' game. note : Top row from left to right: Seishun Gakuen aka Seigaku, Rikkai Daigaku Fuzuku aka Rikkaidai, Rokkaku, Hyoutei. Bottom row from left to right: Fudomine, Saint Rudolph, Yamabuki.

While the schools from Ikki Tousen tend to favor the blazer design, the uniforms of Seitou High are white and light-blue fukus with yellow scarves. (With the exception of Chou'un, who uses a blazer).

In Captain Tsubasa, Nankatsu Junior High has gakuran and fuku as uniforms. (In contrast with the other schools either using blazer-type uniforms, or blazers for girls and gakuran for boys) In the manga, the fuku is in the traditional white and blue/all blue color; in the anime, however, it's shown as being reddish-brown, almost burgundy.

In Kimagure Orange Road, the middle school attended by the cast has gakuran for the guys and gray and white seifuku for the girls.

Shiho Kobayakawa attends an all-girls high school that uses black fuku as its uniform. She often goes to work while wearing said fuku, too. It's averted in the Boarding School case however, as said Boarding School uses blazer type uniforms instead.

The child actress Konomi Yushirou wears a seifuku in her first appearance, too. She's most likely in elementary school, however.

In Amakusa 1637, Natsuki Hayami and her female friends wore seifuku at school. The first volume◊ has a seifuku-wearing Natsuki on its cover.

When Candace "Candy" White-Andree from Candy Candy went to a Boarding School in England, she and the other female students wore one-piece dresses that as mentioned above, were most likely inspired by both the fuku and the "rational dress" codes.

In Vampire Princess Miyu, the major part of the schools featured in the OAV's, the TV series and the manga have Western styled uniforms. In the fourth OAV, however, Miyu wears a classy-looking dark gray fuku with a white collar and a red scarf when she attends an all-girls middle school in Nara before being made into a vampire.

The middle school that most of the Bokura no Hentai characters go to use gakuran and sailor fuku. Marika, who is transgender, hates the fact she has to wear the boys uniform and says it looks like she's going to a funeral. Wholesome Crossdresser Satoshi wears the girls uniform when he is a first year but hits a growth spurt and begins dressing more masculine in his second year. Marika begins wearing a sailor fuku when she begins living as a girl.

In Crayon Shin-chan, Shin's mother Misae finds her old white and black fuku and puts it on... and much to her joy, it still fits her. This being Shin-chan, Hilarity Ensues.

Invoked in Franken Fran, when a giantess washes ashore and, after Fran saves her life, the greedy owner of the private beach where this takes place dresses her up in a fukuto attract visitors. It doesn't work, since the giantess is almost immediately retrieved by her kin.

In Inazuma Eleven, Raimon Junior High has blue/green gakuran as its uniform for the boys, but girls wear blazer/pleated skirt combos that seem to change colors depending on the girls's class.

One of the reasons Kumiko from Sound! Euphonium chose her school was because it was one of the few high schools around that still used sailor fuku, reflecting the Real Life trend of phasing out sailor fuku as high school uniforms as explained above.

In The Familiar of Zero Saito spots a military sailor uniform being sold and knows what to do. With some modifications to the top and adding a skirt, he produces a sailor fuku replica and sets about convincing Siesta to wear it to her bemusement. It ends up making the rounds at the school as different girls try it out.

Taisho Baseball Girls takes place in 1925. Quite a big deal is made about some of the female cast wearing the new, western style sailor fuku uniforms rather than the traditional kimono Japanese uniforms,

Tanizaki Naomi from Bungou Stray Dogs wears her school uniform while working as a part-timer in the Armed Detective Agency.

In the flashbacks, a 12-or-13-year-old Souma tends to wear gakuran. This is specially notorious in the scene where his Wicked Stepmother's corpse is found in what looks like a Bath Suicide.

Masataka is always seen in hakama since he's a highschool student/butler and the story is set in the Tokyo of 1920. Some of his classmates wear hakama too, while others prefer the recently implemented gakuran.

The Fuuka Gakuen Boarding School offers blazer uniforms for the highschool students, but not for the junior high ones. For that reason Mikoto, Nao and Shiho wear white and blue fukus while Takumi and Akira use grey gakuran.

The main school, Shohoku High, has black gakuran for the boys and blue and gray blazer uniforms for the girls.

Out of the other schools, the major part use blazer outfits for both genders. The closest exceptions are Ryonan High (with gakurans for the boys) and the anime-only Takezono (the girls use dark red and light brown fukus, the guys wear blazers with the same color schemes).

In Eyeshield 21, Deimon High has blazer uniforms for boys and girls but Suzuna Taki, a student from another school, often shows up in a white and blue fuku plus Modesty Shorts.

The third part of the manga (Stardust Crusaders) has two characters, The Hero Jotaro Kujo and his former-opponent-later-ally Noriaki Kakyoin, who wear either a custom uniform that resembles the gakuran (Jotaro, whose Badass Longcoat + Nice Hat ensemble looks like one) or a 100% genuine one (Kakyoin, who even sunbathes in it)

The fourth part (Diamond is Unbreakable) features Joseph Joestar's Heroic Bastard Jousuke Higashikata, a highschool student who goes into battle wearing his gakuran. Other highschool-aged characters also wear school uniforms when around, like his schoolmates Kouichi and Nishimura, the bully Hazamada, and Kouichi's Stalker with a Crush Yukako.

When Tiara from Shamanic Princess transfers to a local school she wears a sailor fuku. It's unusual because it's a college and doesn't have any sort of uniform policy.

The military uniforms in this series are very, very similar to the ones that inspired the fuku and the gakuran, and it makes sense considering the setting and how it includes an Imperial Army probably inspired by the Real Life one.

The younger cast, including the protagonist Yuuichirou and Mahiru's youngersister Shinoa, initially go to a school that has gray/black fukus for the girls and gray gakuran for the boys.

Busou Renkin: The school attended by Kazuki and his younger sister Mahiro uses a variant on the concept that Nobuhiro Watsuki said was inspired by Gothic Lolita styles, with puffed shoulders and a long, wide skirt on the girls' uniform◊. However, Tokiko wears a more conventional seifuku uniform from the school she attended previously while hunting homunculi, and continues to wear it out of practicality after enrolling in Kazuki and Mahiro's school. Though Watsuki drew her in the local uniform in a chapter cover, in the chapter proper she says it's too frilly and hard to move around in (plus, the long skirt would be shredded every time she activated her busou renkin, four scythes on robot arms attached to her thighs).

In both the original Wolf Guy manga and the remakes, the school where Hot Teacher Ms. Aoshika works and which Inugami transfers into has gakuran for the guys and seifuku for the gals. In the Ookami no Monshou remake, while Inugami's gakuran is the traditional black one, his school's ones are actually white.

When Ms. Aoshika was a student, she went to a school that also had seifuku for the girls. Sadly, a flashback shows that she was wearing her fuku... when she was raped.

In Mazinger Z Kouji, Sayaka, Boss and Boss's friends attend the same school. Though the first anime didn't include any uniforms, in the manga and in more modern Mazinger media (like Mazin Kaiser and Shin Mazinger Zero, whether anime or manga) the boys wore gakurans while Sayaka and Minerva X from the Shin Mazinger Zero manga wore blazer uniforms with rather short skirts (plus Sayaka sometimes ads Zettai Ryouiki to it).

In The Hating Girl, Ryouji's ex-girlfriend from Osaka wears the typical sailor fuku, but the uniform for Asumi and the other girls at their school is a skirt, button-down shirt, and sleeveless overshirt.

Comic Book

Itchy-Koo of Ninja High School wore one. Unlike most examples, hers was actually tasteful.

Almost Angels depicts the Real Life sailor suit uniform of the Vienna Boys Choir. Needless to say there are several variations from the Japanese school girl model, most notably the use of trousers instead of skirts.

Subverted by the Seijyun High School in the second game, Project Justice. Seijyun is an all-girls school whose students wear Western uniforms, which Akira wears in the Story Mode, but transfer student Yurika Kirishima (who is actually The Mole) wears a different uniform inspired by the seifuku. Even more: there's an all-girls delinquent gang led by the third member of the trio, Aoi "Zaki" Himezaki, and they all wear dark grey seifuku with long skirts.

In the semi-canon continuity "The King of Fighters: KYO", many scenes take place in the Osakan highschool that Kyo, his girlfriend Yuki, Shingo and Athena attend. Said school has gakuran and seifuku as uniforms, the latter somewhat realistically depicted in the manga as having long skirts below the knees; however, said skirts tend to be shorter in the KOF: KYO games.

Ling Xiaoyu and her Palette Swap Miharu Hirano have sailor fuku costumes in some games.

In the games proper, Xiaoyu and Jin Kazama's highschool has blazer uniforms for both genders, though the girls' collars resemble fuku ones. Both of them can wear their uniforms into the ring if the player wishes so

In the standard branch of the Tokimeki Memorial series (aka Tokimeki Memorial 1 to 4), actually only the first game has a Sailor Fuku as the High School's uniform, the other three using Blazers. When Tokimeki Memorial 4, set in the same High School (Kirameki High) as the first game fifteen years later, was announced, some fans cried "They Changed It, Now It Sucks" regarding the change of the original school's iconic Sailor Fuku to a Blazer-type uniform : the complain fortunately dried down quickly, thanks to Konami's clever move of making Kirameki High change gradually its uniform, so that the two senpai characters keep the Sailor Fuku as the last class wearing it, while the main protagonist and the characters in the same year as him and below christen the new Blazer.

Downplayed in the Touhou series. Despite having an Improbably Female Cast with hundreds of characters, the only actual schoolgirl never wears a uniform. Only two characters have ever been depicted wearing one, and one of them was actually a sailor (and even then, it's difficult to tell if she's wearing shorts or a skirt).

In Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale, the strongest and most expensive clothes that can be purchased that playable (though the NPCs can be sold it as well, obviously) female characters can equip and be sold is a sailor uniform, whose description reads "Confers great power upon women of any age group." Though if male characters come in asking for clothes, you can sell them this also (though the playable male characters cannot equip it, which would make it funnier).

In Valis, Yuko Ahso wears a sailor fuku for the first few stages before getting her Chainmail Bikini. The blue skirt matches the color of her hair. It returns in Valis II as one of her selectable outfits (she can switch it for a blazer in the Japanese computer version).

Persona features highschool-aged youngsters as the protagonists, so school uniforms are everywhere:

In the older games, a variation of the sailor fuku (with a square-shaped collar) serves as the girls' uniform for Seven Sisters High in Persona 2, although that same school has a tie-and-jacket combo for boys instead, while Kasugayama High and St. Hermelin High in Shin Megami Tensei: Persona feature light blue and grey gakuran, respectively.

In Persona 3, Gekkoukan High has very professional blazers for boys (or a sweater vest for Akihiko Sanada) and tailored black uniforms with collared shirts for girls.

Persona 4 has the Yasogami High students in both sailor fuku for girls (albeit rather unusual-looking in that the winter uniforms are all black with visible white stitching; it's still clearly a fuku) and gakuran for boys. Given that the cast of these two games tend to cross over (i.e Persona Q), it makes for a nice contrast between P4's rural country school versus P3's highly privileged private city school.

You can make your characters wear certain outfits in Arc Rise Fantasia. One set is supposed to be a series of military academy uniforms, except for Ryfia's, which is a sailor fuku. Even Cecille, the Token Mini-Moe, gets a smaller version of the uniform and not a fuku. The characters comment on this.

Akatsuki Blitzkampf has a subversion. At some point, a young man◊in a shadowed environment is seen dressed in what seems to be a gakuran... but since this scene takes place in Murakumo aka the Big Bad's prologue, it's rather obvious in-context that this "young man" is not a junior high/highschool student but an adult who's wearing an actual military uniform.note (Then again, as said above the gakuran itself comes from Prussian military uniforms.). In the game proper, no one wears school clothes to fight.

In the Fushigi Yuugi videogame Suzaku Ibun, Miaka and Yui's expiesMadoka and Misaki wear uniforms that at first sight look pretty Western, but have collars that look almost exactly like those seen in sailor fukus.

The Tokyo event character Harumi from Subway Surfers wears a sailor fuku on default. Her more casual outfit is a catgirl-esque lolita costume.

Foiletta is a youkai who wears a sailor fuku. She is the older, evolved form of Toiletta (who looks like an elementary schooler). Foiletta has stringy, long hair and a blue tint under her eyes. Both Toiletta and Foiletta are based off a Japanese Urban Legend "Hanako-san", which is similar to Bloody Mary.

Pokémon usually averts this uniform. Despite having several trainer classes who are schoolgirls (Lasses and Teammates being the main two), each region has basically every uniform but a sailor fuku. It took until Pokémon Black 2 and White 2 for a sailor fuku to appear, and even then it's yellow instead of the normal white or black. Ironically, Unova is based on America, where sailor fuku-style uniforms are pretty much nonexistent in modern times.

In Tokyo Jungle, sailor uniforms can be equipped to characters, meaning you can play as anything from a dog to a Deinonychus wearing a school girl uniform.

In Kisetsu o Dakishimete (the 2nd game of the Yarudora series), the school blazer Mayu wears when the player character first finds her is a plot point. At several moments of the storyline, they use it to try and find the school it's affiliated to, and consequently discover Mayu's identity. It doesn't work, nobody they ask has ever seen this blazer. When following the "Spirit of the Cherry Trees" storyline, it's implied the blazer is the one Mayu's sister Mami, who just came back from overseas, wore when she was accidented.

Athena Cykes has one as a DLC costume in Ace Attorney. Even all the female law students in 5-3, Including Juniper and Scuttlebutt, excluding Robin Newman, wear this.

Dangan Ronpa has Sayaka Maizono and Sakura Ogami wearing this. Toko Fukawa wears one as well, with a much longer skirt than the other two. The sequel has Peko Pekoyama and Ibuki Mioda. They all differ quite a bit in design, since the girls wearing them all originally attended different schools: out of them, Peko and Touko's seifuku seem to be the closest to the traditional view.

The heroine of MAQ #41 used to wear Japanese uniforms to school. Since she lives in the United States this was viewed as quite odd and helped make her a target for bullying.

The Wotch: The spell used to turn Professor Sorgaz into MingMei Wu was allegedly created by a "rabid anime fanboy" which is why she ended up Ka-fuku'd as well as "Ka-Girled." Since it also gave her a Chinese name he must have been ignorant as well as rabid. She ditches the fuku after Anne undoes the part of the spell that is messing with her head.

In the Homestuck Act 6 Intermission 3 Ministrife, among the many different costumes that can be seen, Damara is wearing a serafuku.

During the orientation for a group of new students arriving in the Winter term, Sgt. Wilson begins to explain that they would be expected to wear a school uniform most of the time... at which point Thorn uses ectoplasm to manifest himself a sailor fuku, complete with blonde pigtails and a Magical Girl wand.

You’d better be careful with the drag, kid,” Wilson warned. “You looked too good like that. It could get you in trouble.”

Napoleon Dynamite: In the second episode, a scantron dating machine pairs Napoleon up with a Japanese foreign exchange student named Tokiko, who's sporting Sailor Fuku and every other Japanese schoolgirl-related trope you can imagine.

In Clémentine, the protagonist Clementine Dumant's most iconic outfit is a short-skirted sailor suit. It's not as surprising as one might think, since such clothing was sometimes worn by young girls in the Western world during the interwar years.

Whenever Aja from Jem is shown as a child she wears a red sailor suit for some reason. It could be Toei Animation accidentally putting Japanese tropes into an American setting.

Community

Tropes HQ

TVTropes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available from thestaff@tvtropes.org. Privacy Policy